Autogenic imaging is a technique for imaging a device with the image residing in a backup partition of the device's flash or hard drive. Typically, a device that is configured to be updated via Autogenic imaging will have a drive that includes at least three partitions: (1) a boot agent partition where the imaging solution resides; (2) the active operating system (OS) partition; and (3) the backup partition. The benefit of Autogenic imaging is that the image is downloaded to the backup partition in the background. Therefore, the image can be downloaded to the device while the device is being used thus reducing the downtime required to image the device.
However, once the image is downloaded to the backup partition and it is desired to deploy the image, the device must be restarted to boot from the boot agent partition thereby allowing the imaging solution on that partition to perform the imaging operation on the OS partition (i.e., to copy the image from the backup partition to the OS partition). While the imaging solution performs this function, the device will not be usable (because the boot agent partition only includes a minimal kernel sufficient to perform the imaging operation). Also, because the new image is written to the OS partition, the previous contents of the OS partition will be lost possibly including any user data that was stored on the OS partition. Further, even though the backup partition is logically separate from the OS partition, they reside on the same drive. Therefore, if there is a drive or boot failure, it will not be possible to image the device remotely (which is how many thin client and other managed devices are imaged). Additionally, if the imaging process fails for some reason, there will be no fall back mechanism since the contents of the OS partition will have been modified during the process. Finally, even if the imaging process completes successfully, it may still be necessary for any user profile that was previously applied to the device to be recreated. This is especially true when the imaging involves an upgrade to a newer version of the operating system.